ari_ormstunga (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ari_ormstunga) wrote2022-01-14 06:04 am
ari_ormstunga) wrote2022-01-14 06:04 am
Pimpin' Ain't Easy
In my misspent youth, I occasionally enjoyed listening to really foul, offensive music. Heck, sometimes I still do. Old habits die hard. I work as a manager, albeit at a conspicuously low level. Unlike many of my ilk, I am not an ambitious climber and I try to protect my crew from outright exploitation by the company that employs us. I have never failed to notice, however, that I largely make my living from the sweat of other people's brows. Which brings me to the title of my essay.
This whole framing is undoubtedly offensive, but in a sense, one could liken the PMC to a pack of exploitative pimps, and the working class to their stable of whores. That particular analogy would have probably gotten the crap kicked out of me by my old factory colleagues (blue collar men of a type the PMC will never know, which is probably just as well for the PMC). But the chances that any of them will read this post are small, and besides I can hold my own. Violence is not very common in the ranks of the PMC, but most of the people I know are no strangers to it.
Pimps and whores. One group does the work, the other group tells them what to do and pockets the bulk of the profits.
Dave Chapelle did a stand up bit about this topic, wherein the entertainment industry served as the pimp and he essentially cast himself as being a whore. I don't know what happened to Dave, but he's taken whatever darkness he suffered and transmuted it to light, so I salute him. At some point, Dave got tired of being exploited and walked away... only to come back years later on his own terms, and all the better for it.
Because I am not one of the PMC, I don't qualify as being a pimp. I'd call myself a trustee if I was using a prison analogy, but since I'm not and I don't want to muddy these fine waters I'm splashing around in, I'm going riff on Dave Chapelle a bit and dub myself the bottom bitch. I am the most trusted of the whores, I sit atop the prostitute hierarchy, and I make make my pimp masters lots of money by helping to keep my fellow prostitutes in line. In return, I get smacked around a little less and make a little more money, but all day long I'm still humpin', humpin', humpin' for The Man.
(I'm now asking myself if I'm really going to publish this essay... Guess we will see!)
At any rate, the Pimpin' Managerial Creatures (see what I did there?) running things are used to everything going their way, but us hos are starting to get mouthy. When your bottom bitches are saying "hey now, this is going a little far don't you think, Daddy?", the Pimps have a problem. They've lost their connection to the streets, they don't know what's going on anymore. In JMG's far more respectable terms, they have taken flight to the realm of abstractions, where spin is everything and what's happening in reality is just another thing to be dismissed or hand-waved away. For pimps, that's probably a recipe for disaster. The PMC is sitting around getting high on their own supply, pretending their obfuscations and distortions and cherry picked data are real life.
It's not unheard of for whores to get fed up and straight up shank their pimps if their pimp hand isn't strong. Looking at 'ol Joe Biden and his gang of weak pimps, all I can say is they have a problem (did I muddy the waters after all? Is the Big Guy actually a pimp, or just a ho for some Grand Pimp or another? Did my analogy fall apart at the tail end of this abomination I've birthed?)
When they started out, the PMC had it easy. They had abundant energy reserves, at least gave the hos the illusion of upward mobility and a decent living, and the institutions they use to govern us had a fair amount of credibility. Now, they are learning something any 90's era gangsta rapper could have told them... pimpin' aint easy.
This whole framing is undoubtedly offensive, but in a sense, one could liken the PMC to a pack of exploitative pimps, and the working class to their stable of whores. That particular analogy would have probably gotten the crap kicked out of me by my old factory colleagues (blue collar men of a type the PMC will never know, which is probably just as well for the PMC). But the chances that any of them will read this post are small, and besides I can hold my own. Violence is not very common in the ranks of the PMC, but most of the people I know are no strangers to it.
Pimps and whores. One group does the work, the other group tells them what to do and pockets the bulk of the profits.
Dave Chapelle did a stand up bit about this topic, wherein the entertainment industry served as the pimp and he essentially cast himself as being a whore. I don't know what happened to Dave, but he's taken whatever darkness he suffered and transmuted it to light, so I salute him. At some point, Dave got tired of being exploited and walked away... only to come back years later on his own terms, and all the better for it.
Because I am not one of the PMC, I don't qualify as being a pimp. I'd call myself a trustee if I was using a prison analogy, but since I'm not and I don't want to muddy these fine waters I'm splashing around in, I'm going riff on Dave Chapelle a bit and dub myself the bottom bitch. I am the most trusted of the whores, I sit atop the prostitute hierarchy, and I make make my pimp masters lots of money by helping to keep my fellow prostitutes in line. In return, I get smacked around a little less and make a little more money, but all day long I'm still humpin', humpin', humpin' for The Man.
(I'm now asking myself if I'm really going to publish this essay... Guess we will see!)
At any rate, the Pimpin' Managerial Creatures (see what I did there?) running things are used to everything going their way, but us hos are starting to get mouthy. When your bottom bitches are saying "hey now, this is going a little far don't you think, Daddy?", the Pimps have a problem. They've lost their connection to the streets, they don't know what's going on anymore. In JMG's far more respectable terms, they have taken flight to the realm of abstractions, where spin is everything and what's happening in reality is just another thing to be dismissed or hand-waved away. For pimps, that's probably a recipe for disaster. The PMC is sitting around getting high on their own supply, pretending their obfuscations and distortions and cherry picked data are real life.
It's not unheard of for whores to get fed up and straight up shank their pimps if their pimp hand isn't strong. Looking at 'ol Joe Biden and his gang of weak pimps, all I can say is they have a problem (did I muddy the waters after all? Is the Big Guy actually a pimp, or just a ho for some Grand Pimp or another? Did my analogy fall apart at the tail end of this abomination I've birthed?)
When they started out, the PMC had it easy. They had abundant energy reserves, at least gave the hos the illusion of upward mobility and a decent living, and the institutions they use to govern us had a fair amount of credibility. Now, they are learning something any 90's era gangsta rapper could have told them... pimpin' aint easy.